Vice President Kamala Harris on “The Howard Stern Show.” (Screenshot via “The Howard Stern Show”/YouTube)
During an interview on “The Howard Stern Show” Oct. 8, Vice President Kamala Harris discussed her early support for same-sex marriage and warned of the threats to LGBTQ rights that are likely to come if she loses to Donald Trump in November.
Conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was explicit, she said, in calling for the court to revisit precedent-setting decisions including those that established the nationwide constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
“I actually was proud to perform some of the first same-sex marriages as an elected official in 2004,” Harris said, a time when Americans opposed marriage equality by a margin of 60 to 31 percent, according to a Pew survey.
“A lot of people have evolved since then,” the vice president said, “but here’s how I think about it: We actually had laws that were treating people based on their sexual orientation differently.”
She continued, “So, if you’re a gay couple, you can’t get married. We were basically saying that you are a second-class citizen under the law, not entitled to the same rights as a [straight] couple.”
During his presidency, Trump appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court who, in short order, voted to overturn the abortion protections that were in place since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.
“The court that Donald Trump created,” Harris said, is “now talking about what else could be at risk — and understand, if Donald Trump were to get another term, most of the legal scholars think that there’s going to be maybe even two more seats” that he could fill.
“That means, think about it, not for the next four years [but] for the next 40 years, for the next four generations of your family,” Americans would live under the rule of a conservative supermajority “that is about restricting your rights versus expanding your rights,” she said.
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